NINJA GAIDEN 4

I went into Ninja Gaiden 4 half-expecting a cautious, committee-approved revival. What I got instead was one of the most relentlessly offensive character action games in recent memory - a collaboration between Team NINJA and PlatinumGames that somehow functions as both a love letter to the old series and a genuine evolution of the genre. The premise is straightforward: a corrupted, near-future Tokyo is drowning under the Rain of Darkrot, and Yakumo, a young prodigy from the morally flexible Raven Clan, gets pulled into a collision course with the legendary Ryu Hayabusa himself. The story is predictable and the main character is, charitably, a gruff edgelord - but Ninja Gaiden has never been about the writing, and the game seems to know it. What Ninja Gaiden 4 does exceptionally well is combat, and it does it in a way that feels genuinely systemic rather than just flashy. Yakumo's Bloodraven Form is the centrepiece - building a Bloodbind Gauge through aggressive play, then spending it to transform weapons into more devastating variants or trigger cinematic Obliteration finishers on dismembered enemies. The loop actively punishes passivity: turtling gets you grabbed, blocking without timing gets you shredded, and the only real solution is to stay on the attack and chain the systems together. Ryu, playable through chapter select and his own story sections, brings a more precision-oriented style - Ninpo magic, the True Dragon Sword's Gleam State, and classic moves like the Izuna Drop and Flying Swallow - though reviewers broadly found his dedicated missions a weaker proposition, retreading Yakumo's levels and re-fighting bosses. The four weapons available to Yakumo - twin katanas, the drill-rapier Twilight Piercer, the Tremor Staff that transforms into a rocket hammer, and the chaotic Kage-Hiruko dark arsenal - each have their own upgrade paths and combo flows, rewarding players who experiment rather than sticking to one blade. Perfect parries, perfect blocks, and the Caddis Wire grappling hook for mid-combat repositioning add further mechanical depth on top of an already dense foundation. There are weak spots worth knowing about before you buy. The stealth sections are shallow to the point of feeling vestigial - slow-step-and-stab sequences that add little when the rest of the game is this kinetic. Level design leans linear and occasionally conservative, with some platforming segments that can frustrate due to imprecise wall-run angles and inconsistent grapple prompts. PC players have reported micro-stutter, particularly on AMD hardware, though console performance is notably cleaner. The camera, a historical pain point for the series, is much improved but will still catch on corners in tight encounters. And the story - despite a genuinely cool premise pitting two clans against a resurrected dark god - delivers mostly flat dialogue and predictable melodrama. Post-launch, the "Two Masters" DLC added three new story chapters, two weapons (a scythe for Yakumo and serpent gauntlets for Ryu), and the Abyssal Road endurance mode - 100 escalating combat encounters for anyone who wants to keep pushing after the credits. For players who have been living in a Souls-like bubble, Ninja Gaiden 4 is a useful reminder that character action used to run the genre, and that the best of it asks for a completely different kind of skill - not patience and positioning but aggression, rhythm, and mechanical fluency. The difficulty settings span from Hero mode with active assists all the way up to Master Ninja, so the barrier to entry is genuinely adjustable. Anyone who bounced off the genre before should start at a normal setting and commit to learning the Bloodraven loop before passing judgement. When it all clicks, the combat is as satisfying as anything the genre has produced in years.

Alex · Scout Team

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